Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Peter K. Garrett

Abstract

MLR, I01.2, 2oo6 525 complexity of individual imaginings of "London"' (p. xiv). The inverted commas indicate that this is a tale of two cities: 'the actual spaces of the metropolis' and 'an imaginary "London", an interior world constructed from personal sensory and imaginative experience but also from verbal and visual representations'. There has, in Robinson's view, been too great an emphasis in recent critical writing upon the Laca nian concept of the 'symbolic order', and his aim is to reconsider the literary concept of the imagination in relation to subjective 'agency'. The result is a fascinating book of just eight chapters and forty well-chosen plates, inwhich he offers readings of ideas and impression of London over the long nineteenth century, focusing mainly upon themes relating to economics and gender. In his first two chapters, Robinson considers late Georgian London, and particu larly the relationship between art forms and modernization, and gender relations in a society shaped by market forces. Chapter 3, 'Capital City', examines the 'trans formations wrought by capitalism' that effected the transition toVictorian London (p. 45). In the chapter on Dickens that follows, Robinson is interested in the combi nation of reportage and social criticism in the work of one of many migrants from the Home Counties into nineteenth-century London. Visual culture figures prominently in the central chapters of ImaginingLondon, where Robinson asks why the response of French Impressionism to the upheavals of Second Empire Paris found no equivalent inVictorian London, and how the evolution of lateVictorian aesthetics relates to the commodification of female sexuality and to class anxieties. In the final two chapters, he discusses two aspects of Trollope's 'London'-capitalism and gender relations-and Henry James's 'entanglement' in contemporary debates about theWoman Question, sexuality, commercialism and mass culture, and poverty. Robinson has read very widely indeed and with remarkable insight. His sources range from themajor writers and painters to those obscure documentary sources that are uncovered only after painstaking research. His methodology is not inflexible, but draws mainly upon psychological andMarxist models. The book works best when he writes tightly to his title, and his handling of visual material is particularly assured. His connections are frequently highly original and enlightening. The publication of this book is something of an event in nineteenth-century literary and cultural history. WINCHESTER MICHAELWHEELER Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force inNineteenth-Century Fiction. By PETERK. GAR RETT. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversityPress. 2003. iX+232pp. $I9.95. ISBNO 80I4-4156-0. Peter K. Garrett's scholarly study is remarkable for its refusal to ghettoize nineteenth century Gothic texts. Garrett declines to entertain simplistic divisions between a 'subversive' Gothic tradition and a 'mainstream' realist one, and sensibly maintains that both engage with similar questions of self-consciousness and narrative control. Joining an increasing wave of researchers in the field taking their lead from Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall's manifesto, 'Gothic Criticism' (in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. by David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell 2000), pp. 209-28), Garrett rejects the facile ascription of subversion to Gothic texts, arguing that destabilization and consolidation routinely occur within the same text. However, he does not take the historicist route Baldick andMighall recommend as an alternative, turning instead to Barthes and the Russian Formalists in an attempt to untangle the implications of the complex, self-referential narratives of the Gothic. The resulting thesis is a strong one, but has a somewhat repetitive quality, as Garrett establishes the duality of Gothic texts again and again from themiddle of the 526 Reviews eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The book is divided into three sections: the first deals with the first phase of Gothic, fromWalpole to Poe; the second with the nineteenth-century monsters of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde, and Dracula; the third extends the argument to canonical texts by Dickens, Eliot, and James. The invaluable result is that the narrative strategies of the Gothic are seen as integral to nineteenth-century fiction as awhole: not grotesque aberrations, but part of awider literary scene. Poe in particular, through his criticism aswell as his fiction, takes on a new centrality that is both refreshing and timely. The most successful part of the book...